Posts Tagged ‘Galileo’

Cosmology and science

Let me offer two examples of the confusion of science and cosmology.

The Berenstein bears

Although I was never a fan of the Berenstein Bears, we did have at least one or two books in the house, and I remember coming across quite an odd little piece. The young bears were going on a nature walk or something, and one of them asked the fundamental question: what is nature? The answer was something like: “Nature is everything that is, or was, or ever will be.”

That’s not science, not natural science; it’s cosmology. Neither nature walks nor the natural sciences cover everything; specifically, they don’t cover the manner in which we come to make statements about all of existence throughout all of time like Papa Bear. We not only make such statements, but we believe that they are meaningful and true; again, these beliefs do not come from the realm of the natural sciences, for they cannot be verified in the quantitative, observational manner that is the hallmark of the natural sciences. Rather, they are rightly discussed from the combined perspective of common sense on the one hand and logic on the other. This combination is the leading edge of philosophy. These questions can, that is, be approached by reason, and by reasoning from evidence to conclusions, but the whole discussion is not part of the natural sciences.

In philosophy, the rules of evidence include things that cannot be measured. Philosophy works on things that are clear to us in our intellectual lives, but they cannot always be observed in the outward sense. Saying that “nature,” as in, “what you study on a nature walk,” is everything that is or was or will be is a sly reference to the prayer that praises God who is, who was in the beginning, and who ever shall be. Papa Bear is hereby suggesting that a good scientist is either a pantheist (thinking the whole cosmology is God) or an atheist who thinks there is no God, since nature is everything.

We can call him Papa Sagan, for he is taking this line from that old (20th century) pagan.

Call him what you may, this is not a correct definition of nature as the topic of the natural sciences. It is a statement of cosmology masquerading as a definition of science.

Giordano Bruno

You will have heard of Copernicus, and that he wrote a book explaining his reasons for thinking that the sun must be at the center of the cosmos. At the time he wrote it, the Church was trying to figure out the motions of the heavens so as to be able to calculate the actual date of the first day of spring and thereby plan her Easter celebration in relation to that day. Copernicus studied and wrote at the request of one pope, and his model of the universe (submitted 40 years later to a different pope) was of no concern at that time and he was not particularly criticized except in Lutheran circles where the literal reading of the Bible was a demand of doctrine.

For scientists of the day, the hardest thing about the Copernican model was the recognition that if Copernicus was right, the universe must be enormously much larger than they had thought. Saturn, for example, must be 700,000 miles away. It was simply unbelievable! (Actually, it’s more like 700 million miles away, but never mind that.)

Well, there was an Italian, named Jordano Bruno, who read Copernicus and became quite excited about the new map of the heavens. He understood the enlargement and quickly got comfortable with it. He understood and accepted the idea that the sun might be a star like other stars. So far, so good. Also, he had a prodigious memory, and he went around showing off his memory and teaching his memory tricks. Teaching the tricks was both interesting and important because some people thought he must be practicing sorcery to remember so much. Sharing his tricks helped prevent that story from becoming too dangerous.

Nevertheless, Bruno was definitely a smarty pants, deeply persuaded that his superior intelligence could not fail him. He reasoned, therefore, with no hesitation, that all the innumerable stars were other suns:

in an infinite series,

each with other earths,

each earth with other peoples,

each people with its own redeemer son of God, its own Christ

and therefore the intelligent man should give up not only the celestial centrality of the sun, but also the cosmic uniqueness and centrality of Jesus Christ.

It was natural that such a string of reasoning should occur to someone, but none of the five listed steps was a necessary conclusion from the evidence, and in fact each step was erroneous, the first three being now demonstrably erroneous, and the others therefore having no reason to follow, either then or now.

What happens with a man like Bruno is that some people take his part because, in certain ways, he’s the smartest man around – or seems to be; of course you want to bet on the smart guy. Other people back away and mumble that “smarts isn’t everything,” whereupon they are considered stupid; maybe they are, maybe not; maybe they feel, correctly but without being able to express it, that he is thinking a little too fast for the size of his thoughts. There are only relatively few men who clearly see that not one of these five steps is actually demanded by logic or reason; only a few can explain why some of them must fall by the wayside.

In fact, reasons to reject Bruno’s conclusions quickly surfaced, not only in theology but in other fields of thought.

But my point is that this was a confusion of science and cosmology.

Now, just to close this topic: it is fairly well-known that Bruno was burned at stake for his opinions. His modern-day advocates claim that he was burned for being a Copernican, and he might have said so himself, but as you can see, the truth is a little larger. He was a heretic, as Copernicus was not.

Many people also know that Cardinal Robert Bellarmine stayed up with Bruno the entire night before the burning trying to dissuade Bruno from his opinions, for Bellarmine was deeply troubled about the whole business. Bruno boasted that Bellarmine was more upset about his burning than he was. In that, Bruno may have been right. It is a fact that, for the next quarter-century and not because he had nothing else to do, Bellarmine personally made sure the Galileo was protected. Galileo was not brought before the inquisition until after Bellamine died, and even at that point, the measures Bellarmine had taken probably saved Galileo’s life.

That said, let us return to the question: how much credence should we give to science? Perhaps we are asking: how much credence should we give to what some scientists call the inevitable cosmological consequences of science?

And the answer to that is: maybe some, but maybe none at all. The information we find in the natural sciences does have a cosmological echo and sometimes also consequence. But scientists are not always qualified to recognize those consequences. Sometimes they are not sufficiently restrained about drawing conclusions in a field they really don’t know.

Between Galileo and Newton, the essential groundwork was laid for the physics of the solar system.

Galilleo, a younger contemporary of Bruno and Huygens, was incredibly smart, very inventive, pretty handy, and he was the kind of elephant’s child who always asked more questions than people could answer — and also more than their pride could bear not to answer. They told him heavy things fell faster than light things; he looked out the window at the hailstones of all sizes falling together and doubted it. In this way, he earned the permanent hatred of the decadent Aristotelian philosophers of his time, and they spent the rest of their lives trying to bring him down, using whatever excuse was handy.

In 1609, he got his first telescope. Being the handy sort, he immediately made a better one, and as he was employed by the seafaring Venetians, he received a three-fold increase in his salary. Then he looked at the Moon: shadows, mountains. Not inherently luminous; no quintessence at all; no, the Moon was like the earth. Not long after, he saw a comet and said it was from beyond the Moon, far beyond, in the region of the planets. It was not round; its motion was not round; it was, then, “in the heavens,” but not made of quintessence. Then he watched the moons of Jupiter and saw that they fell into the shadow of Jupiter as they circled their planet. They were not inherently luminous; they were not quintessence. Then he watched sunspots and proved that they were on the very face of the sun; even this brilliant orb was not totally luminous, not quintessence.

Therefore, he glimpsed that the physics of the entire solar system was the same as the physics of the earth. This was a huge change in our perception of the size of the world of earthly physics.

1027 * 1024 * 1021 galaxy size * 1018 * 1015 *

1012 * 109 sun size * 106 * 103 * 100 =1 people size

10-3 * 10-6 * 10-9 molecules * 10-12 * 10-15

In 1638, at the end of his life, Galileo wrote a book, not about Copernicus, but about motion, and made this momentous claim: